The Last Watergate Mystery

by Robert Parry

June 25, 2005

Now that former FBI official Mark Felt has been identified as the Washington Post’s Deep Throat source, there remains only one major unsolved Watergate mystery: What were the Republican burglars seeking when they bugged the Democratic headquarters and what, if anything, did they do with that information?

One might have thought that investigators would have nailed down something as central to any crime as the motive, but the mystery surrounding the famous break-ins in May and June 1972 quickly turned to two other questions that went up the chain of Richard Nixon's command: Who authorized the operation and who organized the cover-up?